The End Of The Tour, A24’s Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel pic about writer David Foster Wallace and a reporter profiling him, got off to a solid beginning with a launch in 4 New York and L.A. theaters, one of a handful of new specialty movies this weekend. A couple of high profile Sundance docs…

“The pinnacle of billions of years of evolution”? The cosmic implications are endless. Umm, in this case make that comic implications. What sounds like the computer voice usually identified with Stephen Hawking sets up the return of supermodel Derek Zoolander aka Ben Stiller, who directs from…

The Hollywood Bowl has found its Holy Grail. “Spamalot,” the Tony Award-winning burlesque musical treatment of Monty Python’s routines and worldview, proves to be the absolute perfect choice for the LA Philharmonic’s annual staged concert, and the best such offering in the venerable venue in a…

Channing Tatum, long touted to star in the
X-Men spinoff
Gambit, closed his deal. Is that a story? The only qualification was that one outlet, hearing the same rumor as every other outlet, ran a big misleading headline saying Tatum would drop out of the film, though in the story got only as…

Curious George returns to PBS Kids August 17 in his third feature-length adventure
Curious George 3: Back To The Jungle, featuring the voices of John Goodman and Angela Bassett and music by the Plain White Ts, the network announced at TCA Saturday. Also announced were new episodes of the…

A Latin musical tribute to Michael Jackson, concerts by Chita Rivera and Danny Elfman, and productions of
Show Boat and
Billy Elliott The Musical are among this year’s line-up of the PBS Arts Fall Festival, the network announced at Saturday’s TCA. The fifth-annual fest kicks off October 9 with…

Like passengers who overpaid for tickets to escape war-ravaged Shanghai on the Taiwan-bound liner Taiping in 1949, only to end up on a sinking ship, audiences get a pretty lousy deal with John Woo’s “The Crossing II,” an inert follow-up that doesn’t deliver enough visual or emotional payoff in…

Image from 'Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation,' courtesy of Paramount Pictures As I like to mention from time to time, Tom Cruise's peak stardom period (1992-2005) was at least partially an era when $60 million was a big budget, $200m worldwide was an unquestionable success, and a $35m weekend was…